This is such a rare view. I have encouraged—OK, occasionally even badgered—many friends to go see it. The landscape, after all, is national park–quality, and right here is its best vista. Preserved in its rarity (in our era of sound-byte landscapes, quickly Instagrammed to death) by a half-hidden vista point that is just a little harder to locate. Consequently less known. The view is more literally preserved, in part, as dedicated wilderness along those snowy peaks over there (their summits actually belong to Kings Canyon National Park, beyond), but also by the accident of an underhanded water grab that saved the country’s deepest valley, at your feet, from sliding into the fate of, say, the San Fernando Valley, which, after all, grew to what it became watered by the desert river down there, recharged by snowmelt out of the Sierra Nevada. Which means “the snowy range.”
There is no way to just stumble onto this vista; it requires some intention. You could be coming west across Nevada, like the pioneers over range after range, to be confronted by the ultimate escarpment. More likely, you’re driving up the Owens Valley. Turn east off Highway 395, El Camino Sierra, onto Route 168 at the north end of Big Pine and climb about 13 miles toward Westgard Pass. Turn left onto White Mountain Road; 7.8 miles leads you to Sierra View Overlook. I like staying at Grandview Campground, 5.3 miles up this road, to catch the view at dawn. The fresh air at 8,600 feet draws into your lungs. The desert sky out here, far from smog, has a visually piercing quality that etches this hundred-mile-long vista onto retinas.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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I could say it’ll be “like you’ve never seen,” but that sounds too much like guidebook hype. I wouldn’t do that to you. Maybe it will evoke walking onto the rim of the Grand Canyon, or any of the views of the Pacific, dropping away down to the waves far below your feet, from the wilder headlands of Big Sur. Or the first glimpse of El Capitan as you’re coming into Yosemite Valley, the one where there are usually 80 cars pulled over and people gawking so hard, they’ve forgotten they are in the middle of the road. Out here, though, you are likely to be all alone with your chosen friends, which certainly has the right feel to it.
When you first crack an eye up here, the full force of entering California will be in your face. The mountain wall illuminated in its dawn light is within a thousand feet of rising as tall as Everest above its base camp.
All the snow on those peaks before you is California gold, the ultimate reservoir storing moisture for a thirsty state. Coming north out of Los Angeles a little over a hundred years ago, William Mulholland saw the potential of this watershed and scooped the Owens River into an aqueduct that snaked across the Mojave. And the rest is history, sprouting orange groves and Hollywood out of a desert that—not so long ago, really—stretched to the sea.
NORTH: SOME OF THE OLDEST LIVING THINGS
If you drive 15 minutes farther north, continuing on White Mountain Road up the spine of this greatest of the Great Basin ranges, you can spend a couple of hours exploring the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. A gnarled presence scattered across high shingle, the bristlecones are some of the oldest living things and the most magnificent. Battered by 10,000 blizzards, they cling to a timberline life.
Back down 168 lies, you know, the Golden Land. But not yet; down there, in what is known as the deepest valley in the United States, is yet more desert. Sage country. What we’re still tempted, even in these environmentally enlightened times, to call “waste.”
The winding canyon road necks down; 168 is squeezed to less than two lanes between dark rock walls. No one cares—this is a true byway. It was once a toll road, and you will find the spot where the keeper’s house sat by a spring under a few trees. Oddly located trees are often the giveaway of what was once a toehold in this vastness, the keeper’s wife stepping into her dirt dooryard, smoothing her apron to smile at her two imported rosebushes. Now, wild roses have reclaimed their homestead.
Where the last gasp of this mountain range fans out into alluvium, look north to an array of radio telescope dishes. How big? There is nothing for scale but to go see. It’s Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Locally, the Big Ears. Beaming in radio waves doesn’t even require a dark sky, but as with solar farms, it does take acreage where the towering dishes, some mounted on railroad tracks, can displace only sage. The kids will love the way the dishes spy on galaxies light-years from home, listening for E.T.
Gas up in Big Pine. Everything here is farther than it looks. Glance upward, way up, to where a granite tooth breaks the skyline. It’s Nen-i-mish, one of California’s 15 peaks over 14,000 feet. The Paiute (Nüümü) honored it as the Guardian of the Valley. That’s just the merest glimpse of the alpine heart of the High Sierra, the Palisades. They were front and center from Sierra View Overlook yet barely stood out of the general cragginess. Now, one glimpse of “Mount Sill” is all you get without a major backpacking venture, humping up Big Pine Creek. Or if you’re strong enough, maybe a trail run. I guided that right-hand skyline, the classic 10-rope-length Swiss Arete, maybe 30 times over the decades when that was my job. Gordon Wiltsie, the noted photographer, guided up there too. He grew up at the base of these mountains, a rare native of Bishop.
I was a transplant when we met, Gordon still in Bishop High School and I fleeing the implosion of the Haight-Ashbury in 1969. I lived out my 20s and 30s around Bishop, parking my VW Bus winter evenings at Hot Ditch—“sleeping rough,” as the Brits say, is still easier here than virtually anywhere else—and working all summer 10,000 feet up at the Palisade School of Mountaineering’s base camp. It’s gone now; nothing marks it but a flat spot near the shore of Third Lake. Half a century ago, we had our own cook. Murt Stewart’s packtrain delivered salad and steaks and gallon jugs of Barefoot Bynum wine. Gordon and I named one of our first ascents after the wine. Sip, glug—craggy walls of Temple Crag looming across the lake, outlined in starlight.
Big Pine Canyon was a mountaineer’s paradise. Still is. The Palisade Glacier, should you hike clear up to 12,500 feet to glimpse it, has shrunk by maybe 40 percent now. A mile across, it lingers as a commanding presence, the largest of the dwindling ice fields the Sierra has left. Rising a thousand feet above the glacier, the U-Notch couloir still demands respect with ice axe and crampons. It’s melting, too, though. Gravel and rocks along its left margin now rain down all summer. Once the winter snows melt out in June, that barrage bars safe passage up to North Palisade, the most classic alpine climb in California.
Back on 395, we turn north to Bishop, where I eventually settled. I won’t dwell on the culture shock inherent in moving to a redneck ranching center whose chamber of commerce courted the fishermen lining the banks of every stream that burbled out of the Sierra. There were only a handful of climbers here then, ignored as we bouldered and partied unseen out ever-rutted Buttermilk Road. I was inordinately proud of having stumbled into the boulders there, now an international destination. And today, the chamber of commerce claims that climbers have surpassed fishermen among Bishop’s economic drivers. We even have our own pub, the Mountain Rambler Brewery. Now, the parking lot in Whitney Alley behind Eastside Sports is often lined with today’s hot climber dwelling: white Sprinter vans. Starlink on the roof, naturally. The joke is that if you stumble out of one in the dawn to use the restroom next to Black Sheep Coffee Roasters, you may emerge unable to remember which is yours.
If it’s a hot afternoon in Bishop, you can break the spell at a swimming hole a few minutes away. Find it by driving down East Line Street from the main stoplight in town. Turn right on a dirt road just before the river. An artesian well fills a small, fresh pond. It’s the perfect dip on scorching summer days. So refreshing! It’s free, and close enough to wild. I like the way the water once domed up, emerging from a one-foot-diameter steel casing, pushed by the force of its aquifer far below, smooth as a crystal ball. These days, it pours out ragged, and is oddly warmer. Up to your knees, behold the breaking wave of Sierra peaks, rising out of a fault possibly more potent than the San Andreas, which shook San Francisco to the ground in 1906. Up toward Mammoth, this strike-slip fault leaks hot springs. So reviving after a mountain workout! Just turn east at the Green Church; you’ll find ’em.
I was treated to a 6.0 temblor in May 1980. The fault slipped suddenly at the base of Wheeler Crest. I was quickly out the front door and from two miles away watched large boulders crashing down its 7,000-foot escarpment. Two minutes later, I was sitting on the lawn when a literal groundswell rolled toward me from the direction of the epicenter. A wave of solid earth—eight inches high and traveling at 20 miles an hour—bumped under me and disappeared under my house.
A few weeks later, I described the experience to geologists, who got all excited. Yes, they said, that phenomenon has been described but never photographed. For months after that, I kept a loaded camera (that was back in the days of film) by the front door. That May, we had three quakes of six points or better around here. For one of them, a friend was climbing a steep snow gully on the north face of Mount Humphreys. (Should rightly be Mount Emerson, but there seem to be only two of us crusading to restore the name John Muir gave it.) The shaking knocked him down. Sliding to a stop and fearing an aftershock, he quit climbing for the day and went home.
Following both geology and water, we will now veer away from the Bishop region. First south, with my younger brother Charlie Robinson, for the opening of recreational waters along the Owens River, then north of here for some older—but still shockingly “recent”—news. At least, it’s news if you tend to think of the earth as generally slumbering. Kinda like hearing the “news” that the remains of extinct giant birds have bubbled up out of the La Brea Tar Pits.
SOUTH: OWENS DRY LAKE IS NO LONGER DRY
Fifty minutes south, detour again for water. Here, it marks the greatest divide in the history of white people in this valley. The Paiute people had been here for 10,000 years before invading settlers renamed it the Owens Valley. Just north of Lone Pine, the Owens River disappears into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, but in 2006 the L.A. Department of Water and Power began restoring enough flow to revive the river for recreation and wildlife. The DWP, which grew out of Mulholland’s subterfuge of buying up ranches along the valley bottom over a hundred years ago, is much maligned by bitter old-timers. They, too, thought of this valley as theirs, and they wistfully invoke a place that is surely lacquered by a gilded memory, of fat clouds hanging over blooming orchards that defy the inevitable blossom-wilting hard freezes of spring in this desert. But some of us credit that very water grab with saving this place. All of its wildness, from the craggy alpine vistas grander than the Tetons to empty sage lands lining the valley bottom, mercifully free of encroaching “civilization.” I fondly recall a headline in the New Yorker: “How Civilization Started: Was It Even a Good Idea?”
At the north end of Lone Pine, take the Lone Pine Narrow Gauge Road east and cross the river to a dirt turnout on the bank. The family canoe, built by my great-uncle in Solon Springs, Wisconsin, has recently had its curved cedar planking revived after too many desert summers, ready to come off the roof of a car. Everyone here hails from somewhere else, and my mother grew up in those Northwoods.
From the put-in, it’s 15 miles as the crow flies (but really, did you ever see a crow fly straight?) to Owens Lake. Via reedy meanders, much farther. We scout it, walking along the bank. The reeds are thick. The river, lazy with disuse, has become sluggish. Maybe runoff from the winter of 2023, leading to a once-in-a-century flood tide from the greatest snowpack ever measured in the southern Sierra, failed to flush the reeds away? The water is already refilling some of Owens Lake, potentially compromising billions of dollars in dust-mitigation efforts. It’s unprecedented in the entire lifespan of the DWP: so much water that the L.A. Aqueduct could not nearly hold it all. Enough got dumped for the lake, no longer dry, to reach a depth of three and even four feet in places.
Still, my bro and I are pretty green as watermen. We fear two extremes: becoming mired in those rushes or getting swept helplessly along, our skin raked by wild rose bushes along the bank. Our canoe does not descend from its rack.
What could have been more California than dipping my paddle into the waters being fought over by multiple states, Indigenous tribes, farmers, ranchers, conservation groups, and so on? We are, after all, on the verge of yet another new chapter flowing out of the Colorado River, whose silty waves, east beyond Death Valley, undulate California’s southeast border and which, in the fullness of thirst, became L.A.’s main water source. Parsing those waters has been bogged down for years, seemingly because California has been hogging more than its realistic share—even the mighty Colorado has shrunk, first from an overly optimistic estimation of its volume and now from drought. Welcome to the New West. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” springs to mind:
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
Yet for now, the Owens Valley, Payahuunadü to the Paiute, is briefly mirroring its old name, which translates to “the land of flowing water.” It feels such a relief.
NORTH: VOLCANIC TABLELAND AND A ONCE-LUSH PARADISE
Instead of continuing south, down the Mojave, let’s swing back north. A dozen miles beyond Bishop begins the Volcanic Tableland. Suddenly relieving the flatness that has risen only ever so slightly for hours on the drive north out of Mojave sage, it begins with a hard-to-miss 3,000-foot climb as skiers zoom its long grade on the commute up to Mammoth Mountain. Shift your butt in the car seat now; almost there.
For the next eight miles, 395 climbs the Volcanic Tableland. A table so massively tilted that on Tesla cruise control it barely registers. When first arriving here in my underpowered old VW Bus, I noticed: second gear to grind upward through the oddly gargoyled tan volcanic tuff.
The upgrade is so long and so even, lined by scrappy, scratchy desert thorniness, it’s easy to dismiss until pine trees pop up. First the bushy piñon, a main Paiute food source for the delicious nuts we associate with pesto. Then the truly gigantic Jeffrey and ponderosa pines. Some of the largest in the world are nearby.
Tom’s Place Resort caps the top of the long grade. Check out the Tom’s Place bar, by the way, for true rural funk.
Starting just before Tom’s Place, Upper Rock Creek Road is the highest paved road in California. An out-of-breath stroll at 10,000 feet into Little Lakes Valley, so picturesque that it may have helped inspire the label for Sierra Nevada beer. Every spring, it transforms into a paradise for backcountry skiing, a hip new thing for the eastern Sierra.
Back at Tom’s, it’s only 22 more miles to Mammoth Mountain, the downhill ski area (which local chauvinism calls California’s finest), but that’s not where we’re going. Along the way, Crowley Lake is dotted by the boats of fishermen. That reservoir is a signpost of the largest geological event of the past million years, and the reason for the buff-colored rocks along the roadside clear up the Sherwin Grade.
Crowley Lake sits in a volcanic caldera. Its hole in the ground is all that’s left of an eruption thousands of times bigger than that of Mount St. Helens. Your highway cuts inside the caldera, which is 10 by 20 miles across. Before it blew its top, lofting hefty rocks 110 air miles to land on the floor of Death Valley, this volcano could have been as tall as 30,000 feet. Taller than Everest (Chomolungma). All that was only 760,000 years ago. A blink of geological time. Ash that traveled downwind of that explosion forms a layer three centimeters thick under Salt Lake City. There’s even a trace under Washington, D.C. “Fifty years of darkness,” they say, “around the world.” Lahar from the eruption, a mixture of water and volcanic debris flowing toward Bishop, solidified into that Volcanic Tableland, its edge a long mesa north of town. Boulderers, pawing the renowned Happy and Sad Boulders near Bishop, climb that rock. Chalk Bluff Road, gravel but easy without four-wheel drive, winds between that mesa and the Owens River, with side trails from which to have a look.
Or you can get a closer view of the tableland’s internal architecture by visiting its deepest defile, the Owens River Gorge. Seen from its edge, whitewater plays merrily down there. Sure is a long ways below, though. That’s the last frothing of that water in its delivery system until the artificial cascade Mulholland constructed to announce his water to Angelenos. Spectacle said it all, so his remarks at the dedication could be famously terse: “There it is. Take it.”
To get to the gorge from the bottom of that long climb up the Sherwin Grade to Tom’s Place, we turn east on Gorge Road Connector. After about a mile, go north up Gorge Road, paralleling the 16-foot pipe that carries most of the Owens water, most of the time. After a few miles, look for parked cars on the right. It’s remarkable how deeply the river cut down through this freshly created landscape in way less than a million years. Below, along the inner gorge, lie both climber terrain and world-class fly-fishing. Ignoring the risk of blocks tumbling down in yet another earthquake, we descend a rough homemade trail to prized rock right above the river.
Above the gorge, a more intimate terrain of now-parched arroyos winds across this tableland. Try to imagine them as burbling creeks within the past 10,000 years. See them watering ancient Paiute campsites amid the lush piñon forest of a very different, quite recent California climate. All that after ancestors of the Paiute and Shoshone got here, crossing a land bridge from Asia, which was conveniently created when the Pacific and Arctic Oceans dropped by as much as 300 feet, thanks to their waters being, temporarily, marooned in glaciers. Our first peoples kinda liked it here as less a desert, more of a standard-issue lush paradise. So they stuck around, feeling at home.•
Doug Robinson is a professional mountaineer known internationally for his climbing, guiding, and backcountry skiing, as well as for his poetic writings about the mountains and why we climb them. Closely identified with California’s High Sierra, Doug has been called the modern John Muir.
